Grave witching?

This morning I was reading in the Fayette County Record, published in LaGrange, about a family reunion. One of the activities at this reunion was grave witching.

The story gave few details, as if this was an activity familiar to one and all. I gathered that divining rods were handed out to those who wished to paticipate. Then they went to a cemetery and witched graves.

I’m confident that we have, among the posters on this blog, people who can educate me about grave witching. What is the goal of grave witchers? Do they hope to resurrect the buried persons? Or commuicate with their spirits?

Back in my traveling days I knew and interviewed water witchers and oil and gas witchers, but I’m totally ignorant of grave witching.

THIS IS DONE THE SAME AS WATER WITCHING.*******************************

i have known of folks who “witch” in grave yards when looking for “lost” old graves. i can do it, but don’t care much about it. it works the same way as when you are looking for underground water or pipe, except the graves are not too hard to find as the “target” you are looking for is only six feet deep rather than 50, 100 or 150 or more feet deep and the graves are generally all in a line. plus any big piece of metal that was buried in the grave is easy to locate real quickly. ***********************

i have known some witchers who say the “pull” on the wires (i use copper wire, but some folks use small tree branches.) is different if the body was that of a man rather than a woman???? many years ago grave robbers were said to have used “witching” so as to pick which graves to rob.**************

when i was in Saudi Arabia i did a lot of witching once my big boss found out i had the touch. and the company paid me very well for doing it. some of the pipes we were looking for, and finding, had been there since back before the big war. that job was a “snap” as iron pipes give off a lot of vibrations or magnetic attractions!

the first witching i did over there, had well over 250 ARAMCO supervisors, engineers, and other onlookers standing around watching and most of them had entered into a “betting pool” at $100 per ticket, on how long it would take me to “find” what i was looking for out in the middle of a four or five acre track of land which had been part of a gas plant back in 1934. that little “song and dance” turned out to be one of my better pay days! and of course i paid taxes on every penny of it! and i am sure that you would have done the same thing —–no? ************

Saudi Arabia’s fist gas plant was built at Ras Tanura and went into production in 1961. The first producing Saudi oil well came in in 1938. Prior to those dates the only gas producedm in the area came from camels and their drivers.

It’s just a way to try and locate unknown and unmarked graves, usually at abandoned or poorly marked private cemeteries. The belief is that the dowsing sticks will cross when you walk over or near a buried body, just as they supposedly do with water.

Last weekend while my wife and I were in Bellview, I spoke with a local businessman who lives in Fayetteville who told us about the practice. They witch to find old graveyards on the private land or for unmarked graves of historic family members buried by previous owners. He told us the older graveyards in Texas are laid out different than modern graveyards today but didn’t elaborate. So, once you fine a grave you can begin to “look” in a certain area for other graves. I think he said the witching wires cross for female and move away from each other for a male. I could have that backwards. There is a grave witcher local to the Fayette area.

I’m with you Leon, this is a new one to me. J. D. Richardson’s link had a sidebar containing the link below. It is “dowsing” in a field for unmarked graves in what was apparently a neglected cemetery. As Rust—“, says they were looking for unknown/unmarked graves. Several were found and buried gravestones accompanied some of them. Interesting to say the least.

It’s quite easy to locate underground PVC water pipe using pieces of coat hanger bent at 90 degrees and holding one piece in each hand. When you are over the PVC pipe the coat hangers will swing toward each other.(must be held very loosely) I’m quite sure there’s some type of magnetic field involved but my college physics professor was not aware of an explanation.
At any rate I’m not applying to your website which offers a reward for demonstrating the paranormal because this isn’t paranormal but rather scientific.

The James Randi Challenge is both simple and amusing. Call it science or call it paranormal, call it whatever you want. If you can demonstrate dowsing powers under controlled conditions set up by them and pre-approved by you they will pay you $1,000,000, . Apparently there are thousands of dowsers right here in Texas……go for it, step right up, hurry hurry hurry ! Of course $1,000,000 is small potatoes for a big time operator like Old Cowboy.

Water witchin’, oil witchin’ or grave witchin’ is all BS, always has been always will be. There are a number of old graveyards here in the neighborhood with unmarked graves; mostly ‘ cause the original markers were made of wood. What the grave witcher won’t tell you is that old graves in untended graveyards sink in over the years and are quite easy to find once you rake the leaves and debris away Of course a grave witcher also knows that nobody is gonna dig up the grave to check on ’em. When the waterwells were drilled on this place I asked the man doin’ the drillin’ about water witchin’. He laughed and said, “Hell Red, you can drill anywhere in this country and hit water sooner or later, thats the trick to water witchin’ !”

Red,
This may be the first time I have agreed with OC and said that you were wrong. I thought water divining (witching) was highly unlikely to be possible until I was given the chance to try it for myself and found to my amazement that a forked twig moved in my hands whenever I passed over a buried water line that I hadn’t known was there. I traced it’s course for some distance. I now have an open mind on this and several other mysteries for which I have no explanation but of which I have had personal experience. Lets agree to disagree.

What I don’t understand is what happens when the witcher announces that he has found an unmarked grave? I would hope that someone doesn’t dig this grave up to try to find some markings as to who it is.
That brings up a point. In the olden days, were people buried with any kind of ID in case their marker, if any, vanished?
In today’s modern funeral business, I think coffins are marked as to person and date, but maybe I’m wrong.

I grew up in Schulenburg in the 1950’s-1960’s and I never heard about grave witching. I suspect the same as several others that it has to do with hunting for lost graves, probably in a family plot rather than a regular cemetery. It is fairly common to find a depression in the earth sort of outlining an old, abandoned grave. If one adds the “witching” part, using green twigs or a wire, (and I do think that some people have a gift for this)then it shouldn’t be too terribly difficult to locate lost graves. Knowing who is in that old hole is a different matter.

And, regarding Fayette County, my typing teacher in high school was an interesting lady. Her name was Carlita Dullnig, born on a banana plantation in the far southern reaches of Mexico around the turn of the century of the late 1800’s. Her father sent her to the U.S. to attend a business school, maybe in Houston. At some time she went to work for the Harris County Adult Probation Services and eventually became a secretary to Mrs. Hobby. I know that you’ve written fondly of Mrs. Hobby, and I think that possibly Mrs. Dullnig was Mrs. Hobby’s person secretary while she was the head of the Women’s Army Corps during WWII, and later after she returned to Houston. Do you recall every having met Mrs. Dulnig? She was the stricted teacher I ever had in high school. But, the only one who would allow us to chew gum in class; only on Fridays and only if one had an acceptable score on the weekly test. Virtually everyone in the class, Typing I, could type at least 40-60 wpm, with no errors, by the end of the course. There was homework every day and she would sit at the back of the room each day, with a huge magnifying glass, examing every paper for erasures or strikeovers. No homework turned in, or an erasure or a strikeover resulted in a red zero in the gradebook. Poor work resulted in a black zero or a low grade. The red zero counted double and continued to duble each day until the work was turned in or corrected. Her strict methods produced 25-40 proficient typists from Schulenburg High School every year. She was also instrumental in placing many young women in good secretarial jobs, in good companies in Houston over the years.

Anyway, thanks for your column. I’ve enjoyed it for many years. Heck, I even read Clark Nealon’s “Post Time,” and H. Mewhinney’s column back then, and then I got hooked on read Bob Brister’s great columns and stories, but there was no internet around back in those days to make it easy to respond.

Robert Owen — I was acquainted with one of Mrs. Hobby’s secretaries but she was not Mrs. Dulnig. I’m sure several different women held that job at various times. Welcome to the blog. I don’t get many posters who can call up names like Clark Nealon and H. Mewhinney. I worked with them both. Hubert Mewhinney was the most unforgettable character I met in the newspaper business. Wonder if anybody out there remembers when he was carrying on his strange Jack Wray Wolf and Wildflower Project in Colorado County. He’d spend nights out in the pasture, sleeping on the ground with a bottle of bourbon and what he called his “trenta trenta,” meaning a 30-30 deer rifle. The newspaper business at one time produced eccentric, often highly intelligent individuals, but I don’t hear about them now, if any are still around.

StanleyS — Reason Mewhinney spent days and nights in those Colorado County woods, he was interested in hearing the howls of what he called wolves, which were probably coyotes, and he was also trying to get a variety of wildflowers established in the area where he camped. Far as I know,the whiskey and the rifle were not necessary to Mewhinney’s project. He was known, however, to be fond of guns, and whiskey as well.

I had a great Uncle that drilled water wells around Waller. Frank Emhoff. He had an old 1 ton flatbed with a drilling rig on the back. When I was about 8 or 10 he came out and drilled a well for my grandpa. He did the “whiching thing”. Used either a Y forked peach limb or willow limb. Then he would take a straight limb about the size of a pencil and hold it by the skinny end, and sure enough, it would go to “throbbing” until it stopped and he would tell you how deep the water was!! LOL

Nowdays everyone knows the water table there is 100′ and another around 210′. But then it seemed like magic! He taught me how to do it, and I swear, SOMETHING would twist that limb around in your hand. AND the throbbing limb thing seems to work too.

I ain’t saying yea, and I ain’t saying nay, but he sure put on a show when he drilled a well!! LOL He died in a car wreck, still driving an old Model A somewheres around 1960. We used to dove hunt on his place. Always wore coveralls, no underwear, and only one strap hooked up, usually no shirt! LOL He would also played the “squeezebox” and sang at family get togeathers….wore decent clothes then and had his teeth in.

Do the grave witching proponents ever offer their services in locating long buried crime victims?

Or do they claim that a buried coffin must be present for the witching to work?
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lets hear more about these LONG BURIED CRIME VICTIMS! i have never done this sort of thing, but i believe that under the right conditions, if might work out for the best. at least it wouldn’t cost nothing to give it a try, as i only charge if i get the results called for!*******************

there is always a lot of big mouthed fools running around who seen to shut up when there is a nice pile of BEN FRANKLIN’s stacked out on the table. i have been dealing with fools all my life so a few more ain’t going to hurt me none i don’t guess. **************************

there has been several time that i have given people information over the phone on how to “DOWSE” with copper wire, and they found out that they could do it. one old lady said it was kind of like sex, some people were better at it, than others! and she also said it was the big mouthed men who were the worsted. but she did say that lots of practice makes for better results! *****************

i have had very good results dowsing for mineral veins down in MEXICO-SOUTH AMERICA. every thing on earth gives off a difference frequency in the KHz range. i have a list of several hundred different PATHOGENS that run from 77.00 KHz for cytochalasin B, all the way up to 1151.00 KHz for rotifer! and the total list runs intO tens of thousands when you get into other types of materials. our federal government is deeply into this sort of thing but they don’t like to admit it for some reason. maybe it is the big mouthed fools, they don’t want to deal with? **************************

We have machines that do that witching stuff now.
They drag if over the ground and it sends waves down then over to a
computer monitor with a memory backup
And if you have been around that machine for a while you can tell
that earth has been disturbed.

Back when I was a kid I knew lots of folks that could water witch.
They talked of rivers flowing under the ground. They could feel
how deep and tell you what your flow per minute was going to be.

Of course that was out in west Texas, and the hole might not be straight down.
I’ll bet you could put on enough drill collars on and make that drill bit
come out on top of the ground in your neighbor’s pasture a half a mile a way
if you wanted to.

But back there when I was living as a hermit monk and working a rather boring
job, I heard about Ann Whitney, who was killed by Comanche Indians
while she stood in her school room with her skirts covering her students
and they escaped down a trap door in 1867. I decided to go over to Hamilton
and see her grave. I walked straight from the courthouse to the grave yard
and straight from the entrance of the graveyard to her grave.

The dirt was sunk in. She must have been a mighty little thing, but sure spunky.

Except that there are no rivers flowing underground (with the extremely limited exception of water in karsted terrain). See the USGS website for the truth about dowsing and why you’ll always find water where a “water witch” tells you to drill:http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/water_dowsing/pdf/water_dowsing.pdf

I never met this Mewhinney fellow,but he sounds like my kind if guy.
I don’t know about witching,but would like to believe there is something to it.I guess I just like the old ways.I watched my Dad do it many times,then him and my uncle would dig the well.

I witched up a couple of old graves in a yaupon thicket once. The way I did it was to have a general idea where one of the first Anglo settlers was rumored to have lived, & then look for a spot where, even in a thicket, vegetation was different. I found one and the dirt looked slightly depressed and the soil around was slightly different from the general area. Then I found several sandstones & an old brick that would have to have been hauled in. One stone had an unreadable name and a couple of dates. The last on it was around 1830 if I remember correctly. But as to twitching wires or limbs, count me in John G.’s & Red’d crowd, although I know a number of folks who swear it works.

I fall into JohnD’s and RED’s camp when it comes to witching. And don’t put much stock in psychics, mentalists and paranormalists. I’m surprised some cable tv channel hasn’t come out with a reality series on witching.

You’re too modest, LH. I don’t know about the eccentric part, but the newspaper business is still producing highly intelligent individuals. The Houston Chronicle has one who writes a weekly column and a daily blog.

I know of an old church site up in Smith County that had at least one burial in it because I have a copy of an obituary naming the person and the church. Its a coastal bermuda grass hayfield now with no sign that its ever been anything but a field. I haven’t witched around in the area though.

And another story about a witcher out near Marfa. A guy witched the location but the driller moved over 30 feet or so and didn’t hit water. Redrilled at the exact spot the witcher located and did hit water. Thats a second hand story though.

I am in the open mind camp concerning water witching or other types of underground discovery. I have seen iron pipe located underground by the use of magnets.
I remember reading Mr Mewhinney’s work in the old Post. When he was running a survey of flint in Texas I sent him a few chips of local stuff. He returned a nice letter thanking me and included an Albates flint chip so I could see what grade A flint looked like.

My paternal grandmother could witch a water well, and she taught me how to do it when I was a kid. And the forked twig did turn in my hands. I’ve not tried it in years, so don’t know if I still have that gift or not.

The City of Berlin guesstimates that there are about 50,000 unexploded bombs from WWII in the greater Berlin area. The City of London guesstimates that there are about 21,000 in the greater London area. Of the thousands and thousands of practicing dowsers in both countries, none of them have stepped up to help locate those bombs. Dang poor public spiritedness.

The wires will detect different density in the earth. A stone slab will produce a reaction as will a hollow spot. Wires were used in Vietnam to map tunnels. Worked better than the fancy equipment. I use 1/8″ brazing rods 36″ long. To a true non-believer, no amount of proof will be enough. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager and that was many,many years ago. Finding pipes (wet or dry) and wires is very easy and takes only minutes.

Would be happy to demonstrate if you will agree sign a paper saying you are now a believer when I find your pipe. And guess what? A true non-believer will NOT agree to those terms. He will always have an explanation for how you “really” did it.

I guess I’m a non-believer. I still maintain that the Earth is flat and no one will ever convince me that it is not. And those videos supposedly shot on the moon’s surface were actually filmed on a set built in a large aircraft hangar somewhere in the Nevada desert.

Back when I was a kid I knew lots of folks that could water witch.
They talked of rivers flowing under the ground. They could feel
how deep and tell you what your flow per minute was going to be.

I’ll bet you could put on enough drill collars on and make that drill bit
come out on top of the ground in your neighbor’s pasture a half a mile a way
if you wanted to.
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“drill collars” are only used for weight to push down on the drill bit.
you use a “whip-stock” tool on a “slant hole” which is what you were referring to. the angle that you can slant the drill pipe, is not very many degrees each time you whip stock it. but over a period of time and distance, you can slant it 90 degrees really easy with great accuracy. making the drill come back up to the surface might be possible, but not within a half a mile of where you “spud” in to start with.

Possibly this is the same thing as believing that someone has put a hex on you…they have. It’s all in what your mind accepts as fact. And minds are a powerful thing! You can make yourself believe most anything. One thing I am sure of and that is fooling around an old, deserted graveyard will yield one thing…nightmares!

I don’t know how you explain paranormal stuff. Some folks have the ability and some folks don’t. Lots of stories though of unexplained stuff. An old uncle told of still hunting over near Nolanville. He got to feeling a burning in his neck and looked around and some danged guy was aiming at him from some distance away. I can’t explain it. Much more to the story though.

Was the guy aiming at him intentionally, or was your uncle concealed in a hunting blind? Maybe the guy thought your uncle was a deer.

Whenever I used to go day hiking in places like Guadalupe National Park or Big Bend or places out in Utah, I wore a jacket of the standard bright orange, to make absolutely sure that I was not the same color as a deer.

Actually, now I see that your uncle was “still hunting.” Was he hunting for moonshiners’ stills, and was the guy aiming at him one of the moonshiners?

Is grave witching a new “tool” of those who are into geneology research? It seems as if the articles and videos are all somehow related to some historical society or geneology researchers.

I cannot find anything online pertaining to grave witching of purported Indian burial grounds. When I was a kid growing up several Indian burial grounds were said to be known or suspected all around the state. The older generation who “knew” these things are all about gone.

It would be interesting to see if some grave witchers could pursue the purported locations and actually discover burial sites. They could go ahead and dig to prove their witching worked. After exhuming the bodies then their dispostion could become another question.

Red, we might have more takers on this than bomb witching, at least it would be a lot safer.

PH Larry, all of the Indian burial grounds I’ve been associated with for the past 60 years have been found by accident; usually when someone is digging a pond, building a road or doing some sort of dirt work. Some burial grounds have been found due to erosion along creeks, rivers or on the coast. These burial grounds are so old that the old tried and true grave witching techniques such as looking for depressions in the ground don’t work. Of course grave witchers are not going to go walking around the countryside looking for Indian burial grounds…..too many false positives from their dowsing rods and such. There is a group here in Austin County headed up by a retired Geology Prof. from UT who locate and document historical burial grounds. I talked to him today and he basically said that old cemeteries are easy to find and he gave a short list of clues they look for, none of which included forked sticks or bent wires.
The campsite here on the farm dates back to the Ice Age so there is a burial ground here on the place somewhere. If folks lived here for 11,000 year it makes sense that they died here and were buried here. Sometimes on archeological sites here and in Fayette County we find places where we believe those early folks were buried but our primary interest is in the areas where they lived on a daily basis. We dug a midden site ( a midden is an ancient village dump ) in Colorado County many years ago and found lots of bison and deer bones with a few human long bones ( arms and legs ) that had been scraped to remove the meat and broken for the marrow. The site was dated to the Pedernales Culture ( 3000-4000 years ago ). It appears that having the neighbors over for dinner has been a popular activity for many years.
All in all Indian burial grounds can’t be found using the usual witching methods since the witchers don’t know where to start looking and their pretend methods aren’t any help in an actual archeological situation.

Red, good info. I suspect that most Indian burial mounds/grounds that folks talk about are more speculation than actual knowledge. I made a few trips with my seminary archeology professor to a dig he had going located on the Brazos near Waco. It was in a cave under a bluff on a slight bend. Exstreme river rises over the centuries built up the bottom of the cave with silt/soil so the digging was basic all dirt with few rocks. If I remember correctly three Indians skeletons had been found at the dig when I helped out during the early 60’s. It was not an actual burial ground, but was thought to be part of a campsite. He suspected that the skeletons found there were buried there because of the easy digging in the sediment soil. It showed a lot of evidence of having been lived in over the years.

The main campground area apparently was on the river bank below and would be washed away during river rises. The site was interesting, but because of the river disturbances not much usuable info was able to be gained from it, just a few artifacts at different depths. It was basically a teaching lab I suppose. Anyhow, it was interesting to participate in the dig from time to time.

When I read the title, “Grave witching” I thought it was a misprint for “Grave Watching”, like fire-watching, night watching, or bird watching. I figured it was a sedentary pastime for indolent people of a lugubrious frame of mind, which description I sometimes match–it sounds downright pleasant, if the weather is nice, the graveyard scenic, and you pack a nice lunch. . .

I had grown up enjoying reading The Houston Post, especially the columns by you, Mr Hale (my favourite) Mr Hugh Mehinney, and “Post Card” by Mr George Fueherman (Not sure of spelling? –it’s been a long time)

When Mr Mewhinney had retired from the Post, One summer Saturday I was taken by a mutual friend –a printer named Alan Vogel, who was the elder brother of Gloria Vogel, a grade-school classmate and friend of mine– to meet Mr Mewhinny where he lived with his wife in rural retirement. On the drive up from Houston, Alan told me that Mr Mewhinny began his day before he got out of bed with half-a-cup of warmed Scotch; and that if we were lucky he would play his upright piano for us.

When we arrived, young Mrs Mewhinny wasn’t there–Mr M said she was out “demonstrating in a protest against something” (It was about 1968) but that he was glad it was a hobby she enjoyed; picketing was a healthful outdoor activity which exercised the legs, lungs, and spleen. He said he didn’t join her “because he was so old he was falling apart,”

We spent an entertaining afternoon listening to Mr M tell stories from Texas history to Irish history. I admired 8 or 10 bold, well-composed charcoal sketches framed and hanging on his walls, and he said he bet I couldn’t identify the subjects –but I could: they were all minor characters from Greek mythology–different treatments of Leda and the Swan, Hebe and and Eagle, etc. After I was able to name the the three fates (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) He said I was “a rara avis, an educated woman under the age of 40″ (I was about 20) I still treasure that compliment. (I did later go on to become an English teacher)

Mr M. didn’t play the piano, but I shall never forget what a charming gentleman he was that delightful afternoon. He himself said that one of his greatest accomplishments was to destroy a television set with his bare hands without injury when it imploded. I forget whether he said he shot another TV at close range with a pistol or not. . . but maybe Alan said that. (We’re talking those huge console TVs which were a major piece of furniture in the 1950’s and 1960’s, so that was an impressive feat.) Though there was a great difference in their ages, I could understand why they were friends.

A year or so later, I remember receiving a formal invitation (the engraving was an exquisite Copperplate cursive) from Alan Vogle which ran something like, “The Honor of your Presence / Is requested for the hearing of / Alan Vogle / versus / The United States Government . . . and went on to list the day and the Courtroom and Judge. It was the time of Viet Nam, and Alan was a conscientious objector with a robust sense of of the ridiculous. If you own a printery, you can have a lot of fun sending your friends engraved invitations to your fight with Uncle Sam.

I was unable to make the occasion, and I don’t know how it turned out; but somehow I don’t think Alan went to jail–I would have heard through the grapevine. I kept his elegant and snarky invitation for years and intended to have it framed;, but I must have used it as a bookmark in a returned library book and haven’t seen it in years.

Well, I don’t know about the validity of witching, but I have two personal stories:

I am a Piping Designer by trade, and was at a refinery one day with my boss out in the tank farm with my boss. He proceeded to bend a thick piece of wire into an “L” shape, grabbed the short end of the ell loosely in one hand with the hand held out in front of him, fist side up. He walked over to a horizontal pipe below him, and I’ll be derned if the long side of the ell didn’t swing dramatically in line with the pipe. Thinking he was messing with me, I tried it myself, and it worked!

My dad drilled water wells in Kentucky about 60 years ago with his dad. They would pull up to a new project, pull out the water witching twig, and walk the property until the twig would point down. Of course, he told me with a wink, it always went down at a flat spot where we could park the drilling rig. It seems you could drill anywhere in Kentucky, and find water in the limestone seams.

Scotty, that’s confirmation bias. You knoew that the pipe was there and subconsiously twitched your hand to make the wire line up. Had the wire linesd up with a pipe that had no visible expression (i.e., one that you had no way of knowing was there) and if you could have repeated the feat, then it would have been something interesting.